Politics

After months of negotiations, Israel and the US agreed on a new memorandum of understanding (MOU) governing the next decade of US military aid to Israel. Reuters reports the 10-year package is worth $38 billion, “representing the biggest pledge of US military assistance ever made to any country.” Haaretz adds that Israel’s acting National Security Adviser, Jacob Nagel has already arrived in Washington to sign the agreement.

Notable changes from previous MOUs include:

A) Phasing out a provision for spending 26% of the aid in Israel’s own defense industry. B) Money for missile defense, which till now was funded ad hoc by Congress C) An Israeli commitment not to lobby Congress for additional aid.

The Democratic House lawmaker who had anonymously sponsored a controversial House event advocating for economic boycotts of Israel withdrew her sponsorship Tuesday, THE WEEKLY STANDARD has confirmed, and the briefing has also been cancelled.

The office of Texas congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee had reserved a room on Capitol Hill for the U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation to host an event on Friday. The briefing was advertised to feature “actual pracitioners” of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, according to the invitation.

Tuesday, however, Jackson Lee’s office confirmed to TWS that the room had been booked by a former staffer, and that they had withdrawn their sponsorship. A senior House GOP aide later told TWS that the event had also been cancelled.

“That room was actually booked by a staffer that’s no longer with us, back in March,” Jackson Lee’s communications director, Mike McQuerry, told TWS. “This was done without the knowledge of anyone in the office.”

Munich’s cultural affairs department pulled the plug on an anti- Israel lecture slated for Friday in a city-subsidized building, because the talk would have crossed the line into antisemitism.

Stefan Hauf, a spokesman for the mayor, told The Jerusalem Post on Thursday that the city’s cultural commissioner intervened to stop the lecture on “Antisemitism Today” organized by the Salam Shalom Working Circle Palestine-Israel association.

Munich’s cultural commissioner, Hans- Georg Küppers, said in a letter to Eine-Welt- Haus – where the lecture was to be held – that it was probable that “during the event the line between criticism of Israel and antisemitism will be crossed,” the Merkur news outlet reported.

Salam Shalom – a hardcore anti-Israel group – promotes the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions campaign on its website targeting the Jewish state. ”Salam Shalom has no right to be in city rooms. Salam Shalom would be better located in the NPD headquarters,” Green Party city councilman Dominik Krause told the Merkur.

The Labour Friends of Israel group has trebled the number of Parliamentary supporters backing its work, as moderate MPs rebelled against Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the party.

More than 65 MPs have pledged to back the group – more than when Labour was led by pro-Israel prime ministers Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.

LFI will also announce a re-branding at next week’s party conference, styling itself “Labour Friends of Israel: For Israel, For Palestine, For Peace”, alongside a campaign to back an international fund raising money for co-existence projects aimed at helping Israelis and Palestinians work together.

Chinese IT corporation Neusoft and Israeli-Chinese private equity fund Infinity Group said they would jointly set up a $250 million fund to invest in Israeli medical technologies over the next three years.

As part of the cooperation agreement, Neusoft will also make available to Israeli healthcare companies its cloud database via which they can gain access to clients in China and obtain approvals from China’s equivalent of the US Food and Drug Administration, the two companies said in an e-mailed statement.

Kuang-Chi Science Ltd., a member of the Kuang-Chi Group, has agreed to become a strategic investor in Agent Video Intelligence (Agent Vi), an Israeli video analytics company, the Shenzhen, China-based company said.

The investment is part of Kuang-Chi’s $300 million Global Community of Innovation (GCI) fund, which it launched earlier this year. It will expand the Chinese company’s portfolio of technologies that enable safe, smart cities.

Culture and technology

The first London Design Biennale began on Wednesday, with representatives from 30 different countries across 6 continents presenting their designs—including, of course, designers from Israel.

The designers participating in the biennale come from the top design schools in the world, including the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum in Manhattan and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

Israel will be represented by the Design Faculty at Shenkar College, which will present projects from the Industrial Design Department, curated by Tami Warshavski, the head of Shenkar’s Center for Innovation.

New York – Two Israeli animators won an international award on Monday after their film was selected as one of the best featured at Animation Block Party, a prestigious animation competition that took place in New York in July.

Gal Haklay and Shulamit Tager, both graduates of the Bezalel Institute of Arts and Design in Jerusalem, won first place in the original design category for their animated film Scapegoat, chosen from a total of 100 films competing for awards at the festival.

Clearly a man who speaks his mind, Caan left us in a quandary, having admonished us not to pay attention to Hollywood types, dismissing politically active colleagues who act as though they hold impressive foreign policy credentials. But Caan himself had much to say. We recommend reading it for yourself…

Red Square in Moscow was lit with large Stars of David and decorated with Israeli flags in honor of the IDF Orchestra, which took part in the international military orchestra festival this week in the famous square.

In addition to the IDF Orchestra, Israeli ambassador to Russia, Zvi Heifetz, and military attaché, Col. Zafrir Orpaz, also participated in the ceremony to mark the 25th anniversary of the renewal of relations between Israel and Russia. Heifetz said, “It is exciting to see the IDF Orchestra perform in Red Square, decorated with huge white and blue banners.”

Exciting tributes, a new lead singer with plenty of charisma, and some affection for Hebrew were just part of Queen and Adam Lambert’s concert in Tel Aviv on Monday night, attended by over 50,000 delighted fans at the Yarkon Park in Tel Aviv. Lambert was, of course filling in for late band lead singer Freddie Mercury, who passed away in 1991.

If you haven’t decided what to do on the holidays and you’re looking for a unique challenge, how about crawling through mud and swimming through ice? Legion Run, the international extreme obstacle course, is coming to Israel for only one day on October 14, at the Manara Cliff.

25 tons of ice, 200 km of cables and dozens of containers full of equipment weighing 200 tons will land in Israel straight from Paris. According to organizers, NIS 3 million have been invested in the event.

The company removed the Amsterdam-based host named “Maria” from the website after she rejected a request by four Israeli tourists with the following explanation: “I support the BDS [Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions] movement and will therefore not accept guests of Israeli citizenship until there has been a significant change in the question of Palestine. So unless you are well documented activists who work for a peaceful solution to the problem (for whom I will be very happy to make an exception) you will have to look elsewhere.”

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